Posted by Chris Blackwell on Mar 30, 2008 in
Web Development 
Drupal
Drupal 6 has been out for a little over a month now and I just finished converting the Xray Sierra website to it. On the surface it looks very similar to Drupal 5 but there are some great new features that I love and important improvements that will build the way to Drupal 7.
Upgrading Drupal
Upgrading from Drupal 5.x is relatively easy and I didn’t have any major problems that I found. You first must uninstall all themes and modules and then put the site in off-line mode. You can not upgrade from Drupal 4.x to Drupal 6. You must first upgrade to version 5 and then to 6. Most modules are not yet compatible with Drupal 6 and that will hold a lot of people back for a while.
OpenID Now Included
The inclusion of the OpenID module is a great victory for the OpenID community. I have been a long supporter of OpenID and I am very glad that Drupal has decided to include it with their list of core modules. OpenID is not activated by default and must be turned on by navigating to Site Building => Modules, then checking the box next to OpenID and saving the new settings.
Should I upgrade now?
I found the upgrade relatively easy. There were a few problems with the existing template I had on my Drupal site, but only because the new theme engine has changed a little. The extensions were a big issue as many of the most popular extensions have not been upgraded to support Drupal 6 as of yet. If you are an early adopter and love have the latest version installed on everything, then by all means go ahead. You will find Drupal 6 to be quite useful and stable, but extension-less.
Tags: cms, drupal, modules, openID
Posted by Chris Blackwell on Mar 21, 2008 in
Web Development Web 3.0 and the semantic web have taken some big steps forward as of late. Last week Yahoo! announced that they will be opening up their Open Search platform to allow third parties semantic information to be placed in the search results for a relevant query.
What is the semantic web?
For those who don’t know, the semantic web is the ability to label data according to a set of standard tags for categorization and reference. For example; a contact page usually has some standard information posted on it including phone numbers, email accounts, IM contacts, etc. However, there is no way for a search engine or computer to discern information. Any modern day search engine can read the numbers, the email addresses, the IM addresses but would not be able to asses which number is associated with which person or department.
Using the semantic web, information can be easily tagged including phone and fax numbers and ay other important information readily available to the user. This information is now labelled and accessible to a search engine for usage. If a user searched for ABC Company, the search engine would be able to list ABC Company’s address, phone number, hours of operation and email addresses, all on the search engine results page.
I am really looking forward to the semantic web and what it will bring to a user’s experience of a website or web application. The semantic web will allow users to aggregate data into a clean, and readable format. They will not be bombarded with useless information any longer while trying to find a very specific subject. I predict we will see the semantic web take some big steps forward this year, but I expect it’s break-out will happen in 2009.
Tags: internet, search, semantic, standards, tags, yahoo
Posted by Chris Blackwell on Mar 20, 2008 in
Apple Andy Walker from Cyberwalker.com seems to have the inside scoop on the iPhone coming to Canada this September. Andy’s source claims that the iPhone will launch in Canada on September 8 with Rogers Wireless. The post also hints that new data plans will be coming with the iPhone that are more along the lines of the data plan rates that are currently available in the US. This will be great for both iPhone fans and anyone else who currently has a data plan with Rogers.
Tags: Apple, canada, iPhone, rogers, wireless
Posted by Chris Blackwell on Mar 19, 2008 in
Apple Over the past two days I have read five different stories, which all originate from a Financial Times posting stating that Apple is in negotiating talks with the record studios to create an all you can eat (all you can listen to) iTunes subscription. The talk has been that this extra feature would be a premium amount that you would pay when buying a new iPod ($100 is the estimated markup).
Did you forget that Apple is #2?
Apple earlier this year passed Amazon to become the second largest music distributer in the world, only behind Wal-Mart. So why would Apple now go ahead and try to break a model that seems to be working so well for them? Now I don’t want to sound like I’m saying Apple Will NEVER do a subscription model, because never is a very long time. What I am saying is that right now things are going great for Apple and the iTunes store and it wouldn’t make sense to move away from that.
I spend hundreds of dollars a year on iTunes, downloading music, TV shows, audiobooks, and soon hopefully movies (bring the iTunes movie store to Canada please). Now lately I have been buying less because I’m in this “only buy DRM-FREE music mode”, but most people don’t care. The average user plugs in their iPod to iTunes and buys whatever songs they want, and they think it’s a bargain at only $1 a song. Over the course of a few years most of these people will spend well over a hundred dollars on music, cause that is only ten albums. I know of dozens of people that would pay $100 tomorrow to download the entire Beatles collection on iTunes (if it were available that is).
iPod Sales Will Keep Increasing
I believe people are a little too caught up in these reports that keep surfacing about iPod sales. Yes, I do believe that iPod sales are dropping, but only because everyone already has an iPod. For a last couple of years Apple was doing very minor upgrades to the iPod lineup and not giving people a really good reason to go buy a new one. That all changed last fall with the introduction of the iPod Touch and the new Nano. With Wi-Fi built in, video into the nano, and let’s not forget the iPhone, people have a really good reason now to upgrade their iPods.
I will keep buying music this week, and the next, because I believe that a iTunes subscription, if any, is a long way off. Do you think we will see an iTunes subscription soon? Do you think iTunes needs a new business model?
Tags: Apple, drm, iTunes, music, opinion
Posted by Chris Blackwell on Mar 16, 2008 in
General Every morning I roll out of bed, make my way to the coffee machine and then head to my computer with one thing in mind: check my RSS Reader! This has been my morning routine for over two years now and it works for me with one little exception now. The amount of unread posts that are absolute junk! When I wake up in the morning and see I have 130 unread items and I end up only reading about 5, that is not acceptable by any means. RSS stands for Real Simple Syndication, so where has the real simple part gone?
I can’t read the news on the net anymore
I had to completely unsubscribe from all news company’s RSS feeds because they really don’t get it, and, are by far the worst at posting junk. When a news company reports on an issue they create a post about it and then my RSS feeder is updated with that post. But then they post another article about the same topic, and another, and another. Before too long I have 5 unread messages in my RSS reader about the same topic. Come on guys, consolidate this into either one post or one RSS message. Every time I try to subscribe to a newspaper’s “general news feed”, it has over 200 unread messages by the end of the day. How am to keep up with that?
All in a race to make Google happy
A lot of these sites are posting very frequently so that Google indexes them faster and faster, and the more their competitors post, the more they feel like they have to retaliate. Even some of my favorite sites like Lifehacker and Engadget have slipped a little and are now submitting dozens of posts a day. Engadget by my count is up to about 50 postings a day! Are there really 50 new tech stories to talk about each day?
What’s this whole quality thing about?
You’ve probably noticed a trend or lack thereof on my blog. I don’t post anything unless I have something meaningful to say. You don’t need to read yet again about the new MacBooks that Apple released, or another post on how badly Windows VISTA is doing, because you’ve already read it. It’s been covered! So I don’t waste my time and I don’t waste yours rehashing the obvious. Make sure your posts are original, note worthy, and to the point.
Tags: blogs, rss, spam, syndication, writing
